The practice of tapping combines Chinese acupuncture and modern psychology with the aim of reducing anxiety and negative emotions.
If you’re looking for natural solutions and ideas on how to reduce anxiety, try tapping. It’s a mental relaxation technique that involves stimulating a series of points on the body through light pressure with the fingers.
Becoming increasingly famous in recent months, this practice has now taken off on social media, and no one can do without it anymore.
But tapping began to gain recognition in the scientific world in the 1990s, thanks to the efforts of Roger Callahan, an American psychotherapist who chose to employ an alternative method as a therapeutic tool for a patient facing challenges.
From that moment on, research into this new therapeutic tool continues, and new points useful for releasing emotions are identified.
Thus, tapping is born, understood as the technique for managing negative feelings such as anxiety and stress.
But how does it work exactly? And what are the benefits? Here are the answers to all your questions.
How to Reduce Anxiety with Tapping
How Does Tapping Work?
Tapping, also known as EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), is a technique for relieving stress and anxiety and ultimately, ensuring the release of emotions.
In other words, it’s a relaxation technique based on self-massage aimed at stimulating one’s energy points to bring benefits.
Tapping is based on the combined principles of ancient Chinese acupuncture and modern psychology.
Just like acupuncture, tapping also aims to restore the body’s energy balance. It does so by stimulating those points where energy channels pass according to Chinese medicine.
Tapping these energy points sends signals of calm to the amygdala (part of the temporal lobe of the brain that manages emotions), immediately reducing anxiety.
This also helps to restore the body’s energy to a state of balance.
What Are the Benefits?
Studies have shown that tapping reduces cortisol (often called the stress hormone) in the body, improves sleep, and increases productivity.
The World Health Organization (WHO) has announced that stress is the health epidemic of the 21st century. It is linked to problems such as anxiety, weight gain, sleep problems, lack of motivation, chronic pain, stomach problems, and depression.
Stress also harms the immune system by reducing the body’s ability to fight external viruses, making one more susceptible to infections.
Tapping, therefore, is a practice that, by alleviating stress, also alleviates mental disorders such as anxiety and panic attacks, metabolic disorders, and physical pains, and also allows the immune system to do its job better!
This story originally appeared on GRAZIA International.